30 DECEMBER 2019
O
B
S
E
S
S
I
O
N
S
A Cook and Her Books
The best cookbooks to give
this holiday season
By Charlotte Druckman
BOOK REVIEW
A COOKBOOK CAN BE A KEEPSAKE—a heritage conveyed
through recipes, a benchmark treatise on the cuisine
of a region or culture—and if you think of those we’ve
continued to love well beyond their publication dates,
they tend to have been written by women: Madhur
Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, Joyce Chen, Julia Child, Anissa
Helou, Julie Sahni, Elizabeth David, Dorie Greenspan,
Marcella Hazan, Jessica B. Harris, Claudia Roden. The
next generation of matriarchs is now carrying on that
tradition in their own right, and their cookbooks, the
heirlooms of the future, are ripe for the giving. There’s
journalist Toni Tipton-Martin, who has just published
the comprehensive Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centu-
ries of African American Cooking, or Calcutta-born
chef Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express in London,
whose Asma’s Indian Kitchen is a celebration of home
cooking that, thanks to her royal Mughlai ancestry, feels
incredibly special. We all have friends who are resolving
to cook more often. They would likely benefit from a
copy of Diana Henry’s newest book of one-pot wonders.
For them, it’s a copy of From the Oven to the Table
(along with a Dutch oven) to open a world of possibili-
ties, in a single pot, with a single book. (And what a
lovely surprise it would be to pair those with Henry’s
debut work, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons.)
If the idea of collections appeals, a complete set of the
Chez Panisse cookbooks from Alice Waters’ polestar in
Berkeley would provide any cook with a preliminary
and chic foundation. Edna Lewis, the African American
teacher, chef, and author who did for
Southern cooking what Child did for
French, died in 2006. This year, her
third cookbook, In Pursuit of Flavor,
was reissued, and in 2018, Edna Lewis,
an anthology about her, was published.
For an essential gift, stack both of those
with her second volume, The Taste of
Country Cooking. Then there’s Maida
Heatter, the patron saint of home bak-
ing. We lost her this year, at the age of
- If you love someone who gets a
thrill from making tarts, Happiness Is
Baking, a compendium of her greatest
recipes, will bring them joy.
Midnight Chicken is really a self-help
book masquerading as a cookbook,
although you will want to cook from its
charmingly illustrated pages. For author
Ella Risbridger, who lives with depres-
sion, cooking is an act of self-care, and
here she spreads both that message and the bonhomie
of making dinner.
For the armchair or kitchen traveler, Alissa Timosh-
kina’s Salt & Time is an invitation “to share my memo-
ries of growing up in Siberia and to accompany me
on a journey across the vast country.” It will satisfy
both those who read to be transported to a new place
and those who wish to re-create the food of a faraway
destination as a way to better understand its people.
Georgina Hayden’s Ta ve r n a accomplishes a simi-
lar feat, but she invites us to Cyprus, on the Thames.
After immigrating to England, her father’s parents ran a
Cypriot taverna in Tufnell Park for nearly three decades;
her maternal grandparents were grocers, selling ingre-
dients from the Eastern Mediterranean island of their
birth. Like Timoshkina’s, Hayden’s is “a book of memo-
ries, appreciation and family,” rife with things you want
to eat. Pair Ta ve r n a with Oklava to provide an even
deeper immersion in the cuisine of Cyprus. The latter,
by Selin Kiazim, is the work of the chef at Oklava (the
word means “rolling pin”) in London and reflects the
cross-pollination of the simpler, “more Mediterranean”
cuisine of Cyprus and its more heavily spiced, aromatic
Turkish counterpart. Some of Kiazim’s recipes are from
her restaurant; some are inherited from her mother and
grandmother. “Please,” she writes, “don’t just look at
the pictures—I want to see grubby pages because you
have been using this book so much!”
That’s the measure of gift-ability, as far as these
cookbooks are concerned: grubby hands—and the
marks they leave on pages due to frequent use. I would
confidently and lovingly bestow any of them on my
kindred—just not this year. This year, I’ll be giving
everyone a copy of Women on Food, my new uncon-
ventional anthology that celebrates the two entities
in its title—same as the cookbooks I’ve referenced.
Because everyone knows the best gifts are the ones
you make yourself.
illustration by MAAIKE CANNE
